Searching For a Great Portrait Lens

A few days ago I suddenly got the feeling of "getting" the point of the fast zoom lens. The Canon and Nikon people have these great lenses that are 70-200mm/2.8 or thereabouts, and I never really got the thrill. Hey, I have a 70-300 macro that's just fine thanks, and it cost me $60 at a swap meet and it doesn't require an assistant to lug it around, what's the big deal... ?

Oh yea, the "f/2.8" part :)

So I got it in my head that a good or great portrait lens would be awesome to have, and being able to shoot shallow DoF portraits from distant(ish) distances was a new goal. Maybe this is what has been missing in my people photography? Course, having a budget I also tend to chant the following to myself:

Buying new gear will not make me a better photographer,
Buying new gear will not make me a better photographer.

But if I were....

Let me say that the site Pentax Photo Gallery is both brilliant and evil. Brilliant for giving a forum for Pentaxians to show off their (peer selected) work, and evil for allowing people such as myself to browse images by metadata and see a set of amazing images by a particular lens or camera.

So I have been looking at the following lenses:

• Pentax FA 77/1.8 Limited - by all accounts one of the best lenses from Pentax ever, full frame (for when Pentax releases a FF DSLR), but expensive and limited to one focal length (though it's a good length for portraits). PPG Images, BH info page, luminous landscape review.
  
• Pentax DA* 50-135/2.8 - Digital optimized, so not full frame, covering a nice set of distances (75-202mm in 35mm) for portraits, though I haven't heard much about it's quality (though I'm sure it's great). Also expensive. PPG Images, BH info page.
• Tamron 70-200mm/2.8 - I was surprised to hear that this came in a Pentax mount, and have seen and heard nothing more about it, other than seeing that it's also in the $700+ USD range. BH info page.

That looks to be about what there is out there for high end, bright portrait length lenses. Based on the fact that something like 80% of the images in the PPG site for those lenses (well, the top 2 anyway) were portraits (and great ones at that) that would indicate to me that I'm looking at the right ones. Course, other suggestions would be great too.

Course, there's also this little DA 10-17mm Fisheye zoom that I've been looking at... With pictures like this gorgeous one (and others if you click back and forth) that show none of the screaming "hey look, it's a fisheye!" look that you can get makes me think that could be a really fun lens to play with.

Photokina 2008 Is Upon Us! Pentax Has New Toys

So here's a slew of links from DPReview, as Photokina 2008 is now upon us. Pentax has delivered a few new items, according to the newsfeed, here are some of the more interesting ones:

• The K-m (AKA K2000), an entry level, 10mp system which is probably based on a stripped down K10D. The hands on notes how it's engineered to be lightweight, has newly engineered "DA L" lenses (24g lighter). Compared to the K200D it's got a lower end AF system (5 vs 11 areas), goes to ISO 3200 vs 1600, and has slightly faster FPS. It is also 2.3oz lighter.
  
• The new Pentax smc DA-L lenses got their own entry as well, showing off the new DA-L 18-55 and 50-200. Super lightweight blah blah (7.1oz and 8.3oz respectively). Not particularly exciting, though I'm interested in seeing some IQ tests comparing the DA-L lenses to their DA counterparts.
  
• Along with the DA-L lenses comes Two New DA* Lenses, a 60-250/f4 and a 55/f1.4. The 60-250 would be the complement to the 16-50 (though it'd be nice to fill in that missing 10mm in the middle). The 55/f1.4 will turn into a 75mm(ish) at 35mm, making it a nice portrait lens, but this doesn't excite me that much, but I like that Pentax if fleshing out their DA* lineup.
  
• Last and definitely not least is the ultra-wide lens and 1.4TC announcement. Is a 15mm/f4 confuses me a bit, they have a 12-24/f4 already and the 10-17mm fisheye. I suppose this is case of ensuring that they have the DA* line in each of the "areas" already hit by the rest of the DA line.
  

So all in all not bad! I'm still happy with my K20D (even though my posting lately is proportional to my shooting lately), but seeing Pentax up the specs on their entry level models is nice. I can't quite afford any of the DA* lenses yet so I can't comment on the other ones (other than "donations accepted" :)

One thing I do note is that they are putting a lot of investment into the DA[*] line, which says to me that Pentax is not working on some imminent full frame camera. If they were, I would guess we'd see less of the DA format (APS style) lenses and more of the "F" series full frame ones appearing.

Who knows though, really what they have up their sleeves. Wonder what the rest of Photokina will bring?!